Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  Better to keep away from the islands, in that strait. The rollers race along, surging immense and black toward the black horizon, a far cry from the Adriatic, the Quarnero and the Morlacca. Still, even those waters of ours must be a good training ground, and my father wasn’t all wrong when he held forth in his store in front of that painting by Brun—You want to know more about this Brun? Hold on ... I can tell you’re nostalgic for our far-off lands, since there are even books on Triestine painting in the library of this hospital down here. So then, here we are ... “Born in Trieste, a studio in Melbourne on Flinders Street, exhibitions at the Victorian Artists Society and even in New Zealand, after 1905 we lose track of him.” Indeed, the Pacific is an immense evening in which to disappear—my father wasn’t all wrong, as I was saying, if Gino Knesi, who learned to sail his boat in Lussino before he too came down here as an emigrant, after Lussino became Yugoslavian in 1945, was the victor in the Sydney–Hobart regatta, more or less my course.

  My father, then, was married in 1906. In Sydney He also had his photograph taken by Degotardi, the renowned photolithographic studio founded by Giovanni Degotardi, born in Lubiana, and it seems that Alberto Vittorio Zelman, also originally from Trieste, played at his wedding—an eminent Australian violinist, director of the Melbourne Philharmonic Society, concert performer, an instructor at the Conservatory, etc. etc., worthy son of the author of the memorable and forgotten work Il Lazzarone, memorable and forgotten like every noble human effort.

  In the photograph, taken by Degotardi Jr. Jr., you can see my mother’s somewhat brownish skin, those unusual, prominent Asiatic cheekbones, Australo-Asiatic in this case—Pannonian cheekbones, my father, who loved them very much, used to say, because they reminded him of those of certain women in Fiume of Hungarian origin. In fact Maria ... Yes, my mother, who was from Launceston, certainly had some Tasmanian blood—extinct blood, from the race that was erased from the face of the earth, officially wiped out, and therefore, if it had survived in some unknown recess of the forest, it had done so illegitimately. I wish that clandestine blood were in my veins as well, sucked in when I was in her womb, an alien abusive invader yet welcomed with love and accepted as her own. My own blood was even shed in Spain, in Germany and in Yugoslavia, under the delusion that I was shedding it so that no one could ever again exterminate a race ...

  It’s because of my mother that my father, who had met her in Queensland when he was still cutting sugar cane and married her in Sydney, went to Tasmania, where she had been born and raised, where I was born—in 1910, Doctor, believe me, don’t go on about it. That’s where, years later, I had the good fortune to discover and read that autobiography of mine written at the time for the Almanack of the Van Diemen’s Land Company in Hobart Town. A somewhat sketchy autobiography, full of gaps, but the space allotted me was what it was. Besides, if I had to compete with my biographers and recount everything that happened to me, I’d be the first to lose my head; it would be like lighting a flame under a powder keg, a huge explosion and the ship blows up ...

  5

  AH, CHILDHOOD, you want my childhood, my adolescence, yes of course, it’s obvious, Doctor, you want to understand, to go back to the origin and cause of it all. Well, you can’t complain; you can’t expect to go further back than that, it seems to me. We’re going back, back, gradually further back, to the zygote, to the original diploid happily transplanted—no, unhappily, but that’s another matter and I know it doesn’t interest you, happiness doesn’t interest anyone. In any case, however, transplanted to live and survive, despite all the Lagers in the world. I already know what you’re about to tell me, I can read it in your face, though you’re still so undecided—after all you can’t shut a patient’s mouth, it’s one of the first rules of therapy. These things were discovered later on; at the time I was born, there couldn’t have been a Dolly, it’s all an invention on my part. Precisely, a scientific invention. You’re all the same, you scientists. Envious, avid to be the first to discover the truth; up to that time there’s nothing, only crude primitive beliefs, damnatio memoriae for those who came before. And yet that brilliant stranger—an immigrant in Australia, himself a displaced person—had already discovered everything by then, even at that time he was able to make us all immortal, sheep men and diploids; even then he in fact sentenced me to the eternal punishment of living. My parents, I think, could not have children and he, thinking he was doing something good ...

  O death, where is thy sting? The double-helix cross has blunted it; it’s only fitting that a cross, it doesn’t matter which one, should be victorious over death—and over us, the dead called back to life, seamen who have finally fallen asleep in a tavern and are suddenly roused by the press gang bursting into the joint looking for hands for His Majesty’s crew, rudely awakened and forced, perhaps with a cudgel, to get up, drag themselves onto the ship—like they did to me that time in Southampton—and clamber up the shrouds again, swab the deck, hold the course, once again beset by storms and cannon fire. Why awaken those who are sleeping? I would have been so happy if they had let me rest in peace; it’s horrible, that idea of having to wake up all together, on the last day, a joyful last day that instead becomes a wretched first day, the beginning of eternity, of that Lager that will never end ...

  6

  SO THEN CHILDHOOD, childhoods, I’m getting there, it’s all written here, all you have to do is read it. That wing of the Danish Royal Palace, in Christiansborg, is empty and silent, aside from the ticking of the clocks in my father’s adjoining workshop and the rich voice of Magister Pistorius when he is giving lessons to me and my brother. On days when the Supreme Court is in session, the judges pass through the long corridors in their red togas, led by the guards. The corridors are dark, an occasional shaft of light filters through the few tightly shuttered windows, and the halberds, passing through those beams, flash for an instant like lightning in the night, then flicker and die out in the shadows. Almost like those little windows that I open and close quickly, when I follow them with the arrow on the screen, in order to enter that childhood palace ...—The antechamber door, beyond which lies the courtroom, closes behind the silent procession. The commander of the Lager also comes by with his henchmen, as we line up silently, high walls separating us from the world—we ourselves are the dead stones of that wall. In Dachau and Goli Otok, outdoors under the sky, it was darker than in the palace corridors. Gilas and Kardelj too, when they came to visit the Gulag, passed between our ranks, our walls of darkness, like those judges in the red togas. Every court wears the colour of blood—but this was later, a long time after the end of childhood.

  You pay dearly for red. Uncle Albestee, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court, who had the reddest and finest toga, died because he was dining with the King and did not consider it decorous to get up to go urinate. He writhed with the utmost dignity through increasingly unbearable pangs until his bladder burst, he fell sullying that deep red toga with vomit. Even our red flag, which we held high, though stained with our blood and that of others, fell into a puddle of winey puke.

  Childhood. Darkness, silence, Pistorius’ voice as he has us do rhetoric exercises, describe the amazement of a farmer who sees his first ship, the impious Argo, more treacherous than the treacherous elements it is the first to brave, and who wonders what it can be, a monster spewed up from the abyss, thrashing about furiously wounded, stirring up the water dark as gushing blood, an enormous bird gripped by some huge fish, flailing its great white wings to flee but unable to release itself from the fierce hold and take flight, a cloud pursued and bumped along by the wind, the foamy crest of an immense wave, God’s wrath ...

  It’s pleasant listening to Pistorius, who teaches us to describe ships and shipwrecks, in that shadowy room that is lit by sun only in the evening, by the fire of sunset. On the walls are portraits of men dressed in black with high collars, heads lolling heavily on their chests as if merely resting on the neck; so many decapitated heads put back in place so as not to a
ttract attention, even the collars serve to hide the blood and the gash, that way no one notices anything. In Dachau, the Red Cross Commission found everything as it should be or nearly so. Even the group from the French Socialist Party which came to visit Goli Otok, invited by the Central Committee of the Yugoslavian Communist Party—sixteen eminent individuals, including fourteen parliamentarians—no one saw a thing; only barracks and installations spruced up for the occasion, prisoners selectively chosen, everything in order and in place. The kroz stroj and bojkot, ready to resume a few hours later, were there, a few metres away, but invisible, non-existent; the French comrades returned home edified and satisfied.

  The reek of blood is strong, but deodorizers are even stronger and you don’t smell it, even when it flows and churns in rivers. Even Rankovi, “Marko,” the Minister of the Interior who came to inspect the island, didn’t really see it and he certainly was an expert on blood. Indeed, holy shit, he said, what did we do to these comrades ... He was moved with emotion, even him, to see people who had fought with him in the woods, against the Germans, in such a state, but he too saw little, only a trickle of the hemorrhage. He made them promise him that things would improve and went away leaving things as they were before. Maybe, when you’re used to spilling it and seeing it spilled, you get used to blood, you no longer see it, like you don’t see air.

  Who knows, maybe here too ... There was a butcher, in Orlec, they said that when he went home, smeared with blood, he would make love to his wife without even washing his hands; he took off his apron not because it was soiled but only because in those circumstances you can’t help taking off your clothes, dirty or clean.

  Childhood. Yes, at that time the red was only that of the judges’ togas, too little to colour the world. It was pleasant listening to Pistorius, in his voluminous dark cloak and floppy collar under a riotous beard, hold forth and expound on descriptions of shipwrecks in fine sonorous verse. Even better was listening to the tales of the sailors in the port of Nyhavn, not far from the palace. Ships don’t sink there, they sway gently and creak, up high among the sails, in the wind; at most you hear about some ship that hasn’t returned. I would run along the banks, jump on the decks, climb up the masts until someone chased me away. Up there among the shrouds, in the sun and wind, you feel small; a small fish that could end up in a seagull’s mouth, but fearless.

  That rocking under your feet gives you a sense of safety, of a temporary instability in which it is easier to flee. If they catch you, you’re dead. And even dead you have to hide, escape, because they come looking for you there too, if you have the bad luck that I happened to have. The subantarctic cold preserved me well, too well, when I died down here.—“A cadaver in permafrost with its stem cells still alive ...”—and the Gestapo on duty, no matter under what other false name, took them and forced me to start all over again. For the executioners it’s never enough; I hadn’t suffered enough so they cancelled my ticket of leave, the permission to be released that the governor grants reformed convicts, and called me back into service, compulsory service, forced labour for life and beyond.

  In Nyhavn, at the time, I was thinking about leaving, not fleeing. The world was there, in front of me, free and open as the sea, sailing vessels, brigs and schooners with the names and flags of continents. The salty scent mixed with that of the big warehouses on the banks, sugar and rum from the West Indies, Chinese tea, American tobacco and cotton, English wool, Mediterranean olives—Istria too is rich in olive trees—whale oil, the shouts of itinerant vendors offering honey and beer. The world is there, at your fingertips; many lands are far away but those sailing ships reach them in a bound, spreading their sails like the wings of an albatross and crossing oceans and storms, the dove returns to the ark not only with an olive branch in its beak but with all sorts of good things. In Hobart Town too, when my father and mother bring me to the shore, the immense freedom of the sea lies before me, a promise that expands to include and embrace all of life, like Maria’s smile, a horizon that beckons—how could I have imagined, then, that instead ...

  Even later on, when we returned to Europe after my mother’s death, to Italy, that is, to that marine paradise at its eastern borders which would afterwards become my hell, the world lay before me. We would take the boat at Cherso, leaving from Ossero or Miholašica in the dazzling July light—the white stones of the pier and nets stretched out to dry, undulating like the edges of the sea on the beach, a copper sky and the shrill chirping of cicadas, the light glides golden like resin down a trunk, boats move on and are lost in the reverberation, even one’s gaze and thoughts take off beyond the horizon, into the open.

  Years later, when I printed the clandestine newspaper L’Avanti, looking ahead, I thought that the life before me—before us, before all of us, because only what one does for everyone is worth doing and experiencing—I thought that life, that gulf, that sea represented a free future. But already in those perfect afternoons of seaside bliss I was fooled, trapped by that destiny that was inescapable since it was intentionally built with my own hands, with the freedom that I was prepared to sacrifice along with my life, even though I didn’t really know for whom, for the world, for this empty but heavy ball, unyielding, which I thought I was kicking in the right direction, even using my head to play, like when I was a fullback on the school team, and which shattered my head and legs when they threw it at me. Even when we headed windward from the bay of Lopar, at Arbe, the bow was directed toward Sveti Grgur and Goli Otok—so near, yet so far, a narrow arm of the sea and an ocean of trials and tribulations to cross.

  The world is good. And perhaps not. My father’s clock workshop in Christiansborg, for example, is a lovely place. Time drips away slowly in different streams. They flow together, they merge with one another; my heart beats calm and regular—“Mine too, you hear it, don’t you?”—but when they beat together they clash, they clamour. A fibrillation, a gasping palpitation, my heart is in my throat; look at how that line has gone mad, what a squiggle, tell your underling to be more careful with those obscene spurts of that machine that claims to photograph the heart. You can read anything into it, any nonsensical rubbish, like in those drawings that other flunky of yours enjoys showing me from time to time, asking me what I see in them; you can’t fool around with a man’s heart like that.

  I liked slinking around my father’s workshop, among those glass globes, some so large that when I passed in front of them my face and body would get squashed and distended, buckling into deformed shapes, plethoric bulges that a moment later dwindled into lanky, filiform images, brief flickers on the smooth, curved face of the clock, the stupid face of time passing.

  At times those crystals, those pendulums, those spheres and those colourful clock faces seem like creatures from the bottom of the sea, round fish with speckled scales, iridescent, diaphanous skin, slow whorls, underwater stillness. Even in the sapphires that my brother Urban works with, helping our father prepare the precious dust for the clocks’ mechanisms, there’s the bottom of the sea. Urban cuts, facets, drills the gems, sets them in the mortar, pounds them, filters them, until all that remains is a very fine, glittering powder, a froth of nothingness. When he lets me look into a sapphire with a magnifying glass, I descend into underwater depths, blue darkness, pure whiteness of snow and daybreak, the sea of Otaheiti, where I said—as you know, my papers are in your hands, like everything else moreover, you even took away my trouser belt—where I said that I was happy, but it isn’t true. That paradise of Otaheiti is a hellish abyss, sharks and giant squid ready to tear you apart in the celestial waters. It was there, in the depths and transparencies of those stones, which the magnifying glass travelled and illuminated in flashes, that I was happy, once and never again. No, I was happy one other time, on the beach at Miholašica, but it lasted so briefly, whereas those hours or minutes spent looking into the sapphire, sinking slowly into those blue waters, were drawn out, an expanded time, the fixedness of an aquarium. Happiness is static, unmoving.

>   There’s no use giving me that smug little smile, Doctor. Yes, I know, the story about my mother—you’re always bringing it up—how my brother was the only one she looked at, how she only had eyes for him, that smile when he showed her his deep red and blue gems, and for me instead her mouth was shut, clenched, rigid ... it’s not true, what does it matter if I said or wrote it myself, I don’t remember, why all of a sudden take everything I say as gospel truth, you of all people who generally never believe me—It’s another conspiracy to discredit me, to strip me of all dignity—an infant, you all say, even just a few weeks old, doesn’t just look at his mother, he wants to capture her gaze, to be looked at, that’s how he becomes a human being, I read that article in the library. But what if the mother is a bitch and doesn’t look at him, doesn’t acknowledge him, and dumps him in the middle of the street? So much the worse for him, he remains an animal, excluded from humanity, like the scum of the earth, like me—Don’t make me get angry like last night, or the night before, I think I actually broke a window, maybe even two, and then it’s pointless to stuff us with Fargan, Valium, Lexotan, Serenase, lithium, Risperdal, carbolithium, risperidone, before wrecking the pharmacy I memorized the names perfectly, one should know what it is he decides to destroy.

  What’s this about my mother not loving me, who is this cowardly Sphinx who insinuates such enormities while hiding behind the screen? Ah, you’re gone, you signed off, you were afraid ... That bright smile in her warm brown face, her mouth close to my cheek, in front of the Derwent flowing into the sea, that strange, sweet Italian of hers, a little guttural—My father teased her affectionately about those open vowels, saying that nobody would have guessed that a Tasmanian could pronounce Italian as badly as those from Trieste ...